Page 13 - Handout of Computer Architecture (1)..

A printed circuit board (PCB) is a rigid, flat board that holds and interconnects chips and other
electronic components. The board is made of layers, typically two to ten, that interconnect

components via copper pathways that are etched into the board. The main printed circuit board
in a computer is called a system board or motherboard, while smaller ones that plug into the
slots in the main board are called expansion boards. The most prominent elements on the
motherboard are the chips. A chip is a single piece of semiconducting material, typically silicon,
upon which electronic circuits and logic gates are fabricated. The resulting product is referred to
as an integrated circuit.

Figure 1,2:Simplified View of Major Elements of a Multicore Computer

The motherboard contains a slot or socket for the processor chip, which typically contains
multiple individual cores, in what is known as a multicore processor.

There are also slots for memory chips, I/O controller chips, and other key computer components.
For desktop computers, expansion slots enable the inclusion of more components on expansion
boards. Thus, a modern motherboard connects only a few individual chip components, with each
chip containing from a few thousand up to hundreds of millions of transistors.

Figure 1.2 shows a processor chip that contains eight cores and an L3 cache. Not shown is the
logic required to control operations between the cores and the cache and between the cores and

the external circuitry on the motherboard. The figure indicates that the L3 cache occupies two
distinct portions of the chip surface.

However, typically, all cores have access to the entire L3 cache via the aforementioned control
circuits.

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